BATH, England — Cotton, a material imbued with a long and brutal racialized history, forms part of the enmeshment of Western European wealth, architecture, and art with Black histories and cultures. For Diedrick Brackens, these complex associations form the foundation for his large-scale tapestry works exploring African American identity, shown in the United Kingdom for the first time at the Holburne Museum.
Brackens drew upon a collage of techniques, ranging from European tapestry to West African weaving and quilting traditions from the American South, to make the four pieces on view. Alongside conventional dyes, he also hand-stains the cotton threads with pigments such as wine or tea. There is a homey quality to these tapestries’ roughness of the weave and hand-tied tassels; they resemble objects made for both decoration and practical use from materials available on hand. Some pieces have been woven in sections and stitched together, with pictorial elements aligning imperfectly across the divides. There are loose threads in places, contributing to a slightly unfinished quality that suggests incomplete narratives, historical gaps, and ongoing mythologies.
In “at the length of a season: blood ghost” (2024), hanging red threads suggest blood dripping from a ghostly human body interwoven into the image of a sacrificial deer trussed and carried on a pole by two silhouetted human figures. The pared-down symbols of the work suggest allegory, or perhaps a retelling of a folk tale, but the details remain opaque and open to interpretation. In “prodigal” (2023), a figure lifts a knife above a fat pig as a blood-red sun rises or sets behind them, combining an allusion to the biblical story of the Prodigal Son with an atmosphere of violence and uncertainty.
In previous exhibitions, such as those at Jack Shainman Gallery or the Sharjah Biennial, Brackens’s tapestries have predominantly been hung on the wall. At the Holburne, however, the pieces are suspended from wooden frames placed at angles in the center of the neoclassical Ballroom Gallery, positioning the artwork as sculpture or installation and encouraging viewers to circumnavigate them. The backs of the works, where images are seen in reverse and only some of the elements of the final composition bleed through, offer a different perspective. In the aforementioned works “at the length of a season” and “prodigal,” for instance, the animals can be seen from the back, while the human figures cannot — rather, they emerge like ghostly apparitions as one comes around the front.
The simplicity of the wooden frames contrasts sharply with the ornateness of the grand room, which is also used to display 18th-century gilt-framed paintings and elaborate decorative objects. In this context, Brackens’s weavings obliquely remind visitors of the Holburne Museum’s foundational links with Caribbean plantations and the slave trade. Here, Brackens’s monochrome figures also relate to the many 8th-century silhouette portraits in the museum’s collection. Precisely cut from black paper or painted on glass, these small works capturing a likeness from the shoulders up were popular among the upper-middle classes during the height of British colonial expansion and the slave trade. Brackens’s silhouetted figures, on the other hand, are rougher-edged, larger, and full-body, claiming ownership of a narrative often unseen in depictions of Georgian Britain. Taken with his tapestries, Brackens’s work indicates the myriad ways in which these histories are knitted together across continents and cultures. And in their multitivocal ambiguity, they offer the potential to weave new and untold narratives.
Diedrick Brackens: Woven Stories continues at the Holburne Museum (Great Pulteney Street, Bathwick, Bath, United Kingdom) through May 26. The exhibition is curated by Layla Gatens and Chris Stephens.
